He probably didn't make much though. When the company was sold, they only made $7M off the deal. That split between everyone wouldn't be too much (not enough to retire on at least). Who ever pushed for that deal, I'm sure they feel like a jackass though, considering it sold for $50M in the next year.

Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889–1944) was an American engineer and chemist who contracted polio at age 51, leaving him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. This system was the eventual cause of his death when he was accidentally entangled in the ropes of this device and died of strangulation at the age of 55. However, he is more famous--and infamous--for developing not only the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive to gasoline, but also chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).[12][13][14]

I don't know, there was a guy who tried to make a flying car... using a Ford Pinto welded to a Cessna airframe. CFCs and TEL had uses, even if they had unforeseen side effects. But there was no way building a flying car out of a Pinto would be smart. Especially because it failed due to poor welds and apparently using sheet metal screws in places to attach the airframe.

Well, Pinto guy was mainly a danger to himself, whereas Midgley may have caused the two most widespread environmental disasters in the Earth's history. The CFC one is perhaps somewhat excusable, but he should have known how dangerous the lead was.

Wan Hu, a sixteenth-century Chinese official, is said to have attempted to launch himself into outer space in a chair to which 47 rockets were attached. The rockets exploded and, it is said, neither he nor the chair were ever seen again.

I've certainly noticed this phenomenon but not enough to say it as a blanket statement. What I will say is that I've been surprised by other people's reactions to my homosexuality. It's just one liberal issue, but for the most part I notice that even if some conservatives outwardly project a feeling of wrongness against it they still don't change their behavior when they find out. However, many people who project an emotional response in favor of gay rights will become stand-off-ish in the face of homosexuality. Perhaps they are compensating?

I fully realize that the conservatives I see aren't the hard-core tea partiers or deep south bigots, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Isn't recognizing that a gut reaction is not the appropriate basis for societal laws a good thing? If being around red-haired men makes me feel uncomfortable due to being raped by my uncle as a child; my emotional reaction doesn't need to be consistent with my rational realization that not all red-haired people are rapists.

There is nothing dishonest about feeling (emotionally) one way, but intellectually supporting something else.

Liberals believe in equal rights for everyone. They believe that everyone is entitled to not be judged for who they are.

Conservatives believe in conforming to structure, tradition and the way it's been. They believe it's better to put on a mask to fit society rather than change society to fit them.

Thus, they are happy to put on a mask to fuck/date liberals. However, liberals won't put on a mask to fit them, so liberals will continually find it irritating that their conservative loved one can't respect people for who they want to be.

See. here's the thing though: I bet match.com is WAY more popular in the cities, and cities tend to be more liberal places. In other words, there are probably a ton more liberals on the site than conservatives. So conservatives (in the city, at least) are almost forced to be willing to date liberals since they're surrounded by them.

I have to wonder if "conservative" is just a default label for a lot of people. Polls show that while ~%40 of Americans identify as conservative, things get more complicated when you look at their stances on actual issue. (The stated vs revealed preferences dichotomy again.) So my hypothesis is that there is a group of people who call themselves "conservative" but are actually somewhat moderate, whereas someone who self-identifies as "liberal" is more sure of their beliefs.

I lean to the left on a lot of things, but I'm not a hippie nor anything remotely resembling it, I'm a gun-toting Texan and former infantry Marine, but damnit, I've just got such a soft spot for hippie chicks [NSFW], I don't know what it is, but I really like them.

I've never thought about this particular thing before, and thus didn't previously have any standpoint on it, and I don't have anything in particular against liberals. I don't see how confirmation bias would play into this. I was just stating that that stood out to me, and it conformed to my experiences as well.

That's really, really up to interpretation though. One could easily make the argument that liberals tend to stand by their values at the cost of mating opportunity while conservatives are more willing to abandon values when it's inconvenient.

Reminds me of disease epidemiology - you can eradicate a disease without knowing the mechanism of the disease. If you can model the spread and containment of infections, that is sufficient enough.

Probably the same can be said here. No interpretation needs to be made with respect to the motives of the players involved. We can just observe a trend or behavior, and act on that. There doesn't need to be any posturing on values.

Or, liberals are hotter. I used to have this discussion with one of the conservative student leaders on my college campus, who constantly lamented to me about how much hotter all the people on my side of the fence were, and there were simply no hot women in the conservative clubs. Eventually they got one (she was a stunner), but we still had dozens.

Or that conservatives are less judgmental of people that disagree with them (less inclined to think that their different views mean they are stupid and evil) and more willing to talk to people with disparate points of view.

Or it could be that the majority of people who have little to no interest in politics still state a preference towards conservatism while those willing to associate themselves with the dreaded term 'liberal' are more invested in their political persuasion and subsequently place more emphasis on the political persuasion of those they seek to fuck. Think Larry David turning down the Bush supporter in season four.

As long as we are speculating...it could be that the highest percentage of people on the site are young, tech-savvy types who are more likely to be liberal. It may be harder to find conservatives on the site, so conservatives look at more liberals, then the computer shows them more liberals. Maybe they are just as prejudiced and would rather look at conservative profiles, but can't find as many.

I found this interesting as well. Take reddit, for example - a predominantly liberal community with quite a few conservative contributors. I doubt that liberals, on the other hand, would constructively participate in a predominantly conservative community.

One would have to be careful interpreting this information (it could easily be confounded by age, for example) but I don't think it strikes me as unlikely.

I'm a fairly outspoken liberal and I would find it hard to consider dating someone who was conservative. I consider many conservative policies to be actively immoral: if you think one should cut teachers' pensions before tax exemptions on corporate jets, I think you are a cunt. I would assume that a conservative is less likely to think you are a cunt for saying "actually I think teachers shouldn't live in poverty after retirement".

For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. Indeed, says Thombre, "the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.

I see we're off to a sensational morning. Okay first things first, conservatives creeping on liberal pages more often, then having algorithms continually redirect them to yet more liberal profiles to creep on does not mean that they are open minded. That is the most inane assumption, and that's all it is, I've heard in a while. When you browse, do you first look at the pictures or the profile information?

Aren't men more often conservative than women? I doubt it has a lot to do with open mindedness and more to do with desperation and/or the lack of rigid checklists inherent for most the males of the species.

No dude, that guy should have totally known that it was going to backfire on him. When you build a device for a guy who loves killing people via brutal torture, you're not exactly dealing with a moral or rational character.

Interesting article. I never joined because I thought it would make me look desperate. Now eh, once I'm back in America and living on my own I might. I've also known a few folks that met their significant others online (not necessarily through Match though).

What would be even more hilarious: if the founder of E-harmony's wife/girlfriend left him for another woman. For those who don't know: E-harmony does not allow LGBTQ folks to look for their own gender because the company is conservative/religious.

Nor is the online dating experience universally positive. Plenty of users give up on the service after one too many bad dates. "The Match algorithm should have figured out that I don't want a 45-year-old from New Jersey," said one frustrated thirty-something professional woman from Manhattan. "Every time I log on I feel faintly insulted."

I don't trust dating sites anyway. The free ones are full of deadbeats who can't afford to subscribe to pay sites and the pay-to-play sites won't give you your best match because they don't want you to find someone and end your paid subscription. Just my opinion.

I've always chuckled that match left off in their advertising that they are the site that results in the most divorces. Because if their matches result in the most first dates, the most relationships, and the most marriages then, statistically, you know...